At The MV Times, we have witnessed over the past few years a distressing erosion of civility in our own comments pages. So we decided that over the holidays, we would suspend all comments and ask the Island community to help us reflect on how we can establish a more civil dialogue. We are still in the process of reviewing our comments policy, but we want to share that after an initial review, we plan to bring a moderated comments section back by the end of this month.
After consideration, we believe the comment section can indeed be a place for respectful and productive dialogue, and provide value to the Island community, albeit with better oversight than in the past, and with an improved set of policies that will guide us. We hope you recognize that to review all comments from the past is too daunting a task for our small staff, but evaluating some particularly egregious ones and reviewing our processes are things we feel will help us to do better in the future.
Since November, we have been re-evaluating, and at one point even seriously considered ending comments altogether. We sought out the counsel of Islander leaders past and present, of notable thought leaders on the role of a free press, and heads of our Island’s faith communities, as well as the past editors of The MV Times. Most importantly, we tried to listen to you, our readers, about the best way forward. The comments we received from our readers were particularly insightful, and enormously appreciated as we have tried to navigate this terrain.
As we learned, the problems associated with online comments are not unique to The MV Times, but have become a scourge across print and digital media. We want to think of our Island as perhaps uniquely high-minded and community-oriented, but the sad truth is the comments on our pages had become outlandish at times, and offensive too often, and seemed to contribute to polarizing our community.
Nationally, public discourse in the age of social media has raised the temperature on how we communicate, and fostered a culture of posting opinions before there’s even time to think through a thought. It’s finger-pointing and yelling in an echo chamber, and it’s a problem on Facebook, it’s a problem in national newspapers, and it has been a problem for us here in our newsroom on Beach Road.
That said, upon reflection, we’ve realized that we want to offer a place for Islanders to have robust, thoughtful, and good conversation. We think it is worth the time to try to do it well. And given the right guardrails, we think we could provide that space. Indeed, we believe it is central to the role of a strong, independent newspaper to convene the community around differences of opinion, and try to help us all understand one another’s points of view. That is how we can best inform a democratic process.
What we do not want, and what we fear some past comments we approved for publication have contributed to, is coarse rhetoric, intolerance, and ultimately polarization. That we have allowed trolls to have too loud a voice. The world and our Island doesn’t need more vitriol, more careless, thoughtless, and unproductive discourse. We have been disheartened by the darker depths that the dialogue has descended to and we share the responsibility. We want to apologize to all of you for any failings, and we are promising to try to do much better in this regard.
So how might we encourage productive comments and spur good conversation?
We have decided to continue our policy of requiring a moderator to approve comments submitted to us. A moderator’s task will cut into our already limited resources at a small community newspaper. In order to limit the impact to those resources, we are introducing new rules that will limit each commenter to one approved comment per day, and we are going to suggest to our community that comments should be open only to paid subscribers. We are also capping each comment at 100 words, and request that verifiable names and email addresses be provided.
Any comment will need to be grounded in the matter at hand, pertaining to the story the subscriber wishes to comment on. If it’s a story about leaf blowers, only comments on leaf blowers will be accepted, and we will not tolerate commenters drifting into ideological rants on other matters.
Most importantly, there should be zero threats of violence, and we will not tolerate ad hominem attacks. There will be absolutely no attacking someone for their race, sexual orientation, religion, political beliefs, or gender. When readers want to highlight their political points of view, they will have to do so by respecting all of these parameters, or the comment will not be posted.
We are also implementing a three-strike policy for commenters who violate these rules. If a poster insistently attacks others, he or she will be banned after three warnings.
We are also going to continue a past policy that shut down comments on news stories after seven days.
If you want to make a comment that is more than 100 words, or if you are not a subscriber, we encourage you to write a letter to the editor, a platform that often leads to much more thoughtful remarks.
We also want to own up to those failures that we have made in the past. Our moderator let comments pass through that were offensive. Some were abusive, some were racist, some were anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant. We truly regret the mistakes of the past, and have gone through past comments and tried our best to remove them from the site. If there are comments in our digital archive that you believe violate our guidelines, please let us know, and we will review them. We need your help, and want to invite you into the process as our readers. We can’t possibly police every comment from well over a decade of online posts, but if there is one that you don’t like, let us know, and we will evaluate it.
We also consider this an evolving process. We are working on forming a small, informal panel of advisors, a collection of thoughtful Islanders we can call on for advice and guidance. If you want to recommend anyone, or if you yourself want to be considered for this body, send us an email. Again, this will be a small and revolving body of advisers. We also want to hear from you going forward. What are we doing right; what are we doing wrong?
We leave you with thoughts from readers who responded to our request for guidance as we went through this evaluation process. There were many, and we will try to find a place to publish more, and we still want to hear from you. Send us a note at editor@mvtimes.com or sam.houghton@mvtimes.com.
Susanna Sturgis: Heated and/or vitriolic comments are an ongoing problem … My impression is that much of the nastiness is coming from a handful of individuals, and they often get into head-to-heads with each other, which ratchets up the heat. Certain hot-button issues generate about 90 percent of the unpleasantness. This, not surprisingly, discourages others from commenting, so the comments (at least on certain subjects) become a mostly closed shop.
Cynthia Aguilar: Thank you for holding comments for now — and for looking closely at the comments section in general. I find at least half of the comments rude, ignorant, hateful and/or personally abusive. You do not want that in your paper. I also sometimes wonder if it is a knowledgeable Island person commenting. I understand the reasoning behind having a comments section — to have community discussion of community issues. I support this. But because the most abusive commenters would probably accuse you of unfairness if you restricted their participation, I do not see how you can have a comments section at all.
Tom Engley: I feel you should continue the comments, but limit it to, say, 50 words or less. And no back-and-forth nonsense. And you must use your real name. I know that’s asking a lot, but I use mine all the time. I get a thrill out of reading my comment, and people … crap, that’s 50.
Ebba Rene Hierta: I applaud your decision to put online comments on hold. I share your concerns that the incivility, enmity, cruelty, and utter lack of empathy that have become hallmarks of our national culture are flooding into our once predominantly kind and compassionate Island. We all have an obligation to examine our own actions and policies, and eliminate this where we can. Thank you for being a leader in the effort to turn from, in the words of New York Times essayist David Brooks, the “sad, lonely, angry, and mean” society we’ve become. I’m with you. I’m pledging to seek out joy, community, and compassion where I can find it, starting with a hard look in my own mirror.
Kevin Conley: I grew up here on this beautiful Island, and I value what my community thinks about the subjects MV Times reports on. Unfortunately, over the past five-ish years, it seems as if the same five to 10 people are using the Times comment section as their own personal social media. I cringe now when I go to the comment section to see how my community feels about certain subjects, only to see the same few people commenting under every single comment. It’s exhausting.
Peter Bruce: Good move in suspending comments! They are alluring in terms of attracting readers’ attention, but suffer from the same affliction that ails all social media — that which attracts attention is aggressive, tendentious, vulgar, hateful, and outrageous. Here’s an idea: Solicit and collect comments, submit a bunch to ChatGPT (or your favorite LLM) and ask it to select the most interesting, original, and to the point, and least vulgar, hateful, etc. You might be surprised at how well it does.